I just wanted to be one of those actors who works at the National Theatre the whole time.
As far as I'm concerned, an audience is an audience. Whether it's an audience in Hull or the National Theatre, that's who you play to. It's not money - it's good to get some, but that's not why I do it. You do it because you have to, to tell a story.
Places like the National Theatre or Sheffield, these great engines of theatre, make us cutting edge because they can be experimental. They can do plays that nobody else can afford to do in ways nobody else can afford to do.
Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.
I moved to London to work at the National Theatre and spent my first wage packet on Patti Smith, Bowie and Velvets records.
I was at stage school in Birmingham Rep when I was called down to London for an audition in the National Theatre. Maximilian Schell, the film actor, was casting Tales from the Vienna Woods. He was looking at me for a small, but significant, role.
